Archives for December 2010

A thought for 2011 from the smartest guy on the planet. OK, one of the smartest … EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Click for the TV interview. It’s in German. In this TV interview about the German literary scene, old amigo Carl Weissner, author of Death in Paris and Manhattan Muffdiver — and translator of too many books to list — sounds as if he’s sitting in a bar gossiping about gangsters. “Right,” he messages in an […]

Julian Assange speaks to David Frost. A friend writes: “I see an escalating need for him to break himself down to subatomic particles and travel by solar wind…” (For continuing updates go to Nemesis a k a Mr. Wikileaks and scroll down.) EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Here’s Joe “Good Guy” Biden contradicting himself about Wikileaks. Sickening isn’t it. Thank you, Glenn Greenwald. (Update: Dec. 19 — Really sickening, to say nothing of U.S. officials calling European standards for human rights an “irritant.”) Which brings me to Paul Krugman’s blogpost “Decade of the Living Dead.” Krugman’s blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, […]

The roundup and the rap continue … EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Violence in the streets scares the shit out of the authorities. More than guerrilla geeks, student rioters in the streets send the authorities into a panic, making them so repressive that the violence boomerangs. The authorities lose control of the situation and whatever moral highground they may claim. Guerrilla geeks also frighten the authorities, but […]

Is Operation Payback “the first great cyber war” or just a “major shitstorm?” Are the mounting cyberattacks in support of Wikileaks something like the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s? Remember Mario Savio? Remember his prescient speech on the UC Berkeley campus in 1964? There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes […]

Here’s one way the print version of a daily newspaper beats the online version. Paul Krugman’s NYT column this morning, Freezing Out Hope, begins: After the Democratic “shellacking” in the midterm elections, everyone wondered how President Obama would respond. Would he show what he was made of? Would he stand firm for the values he […]